Some of you will laugh and laugh, but I loved LOST HORIZON this evening. In spite of the places where it goes off the tracks, or maybe it's the viewer that goes off the tracks, there are some strong, beautiful scenes, with eye and ear candy galore. Certainly one of the more beautiful failures of all time.
I wish I'd gone to see it when it was released, which IMDb tells me was in March 1973. What kept me from it? I'd been living in Hollywood almost a year, loving the life there and going to a lot of things. It would surely have made some difference in how I ended up perceiving the film when I did finally see it some years later. Sadly, that was on TV, on some hideous afternoon movie, panned and scanned and commercial-interrupted out of existence. I was never so quickly turned against something, and it wasn't till the widescreen laserdisc appeared that I was able to begin appreciating it in small doses.
Even with the coming of the Sony DVD-R last year, I never watched it all straight through. Until tonight. I kept thinking I'd probably take a break halfway through, but I couldn't make myself turn it off and break the spell. I kid you not. And I haven't had a drop, your Honor! (Really.)
